Wednesday, 11 November 2015

This post is a slightly different version of Digital Public History narratives with Photographs. In: Public History Weekly 3 (2015) 31, DOI: dx.doi.org/10.1515/phw-2015-4706. (German and French versions also available in PHW).

Social Media are “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.”[1] They facilitate various forms of web communication between individuals and communities. They can bring users together to discuss common issues and to share traces of the past. Local communities’ engagement with the past, mediated or not, are made possible through Web 2.0 practices. New virtual contacts could be built when communities are no longer present in physical spaces.[2]

Everybody’s got talent: user-generated knowledge

If social media allow dispersed communities to reconnect online and share their memories, today, understanding how common people use social media and play with history tells us many things about which pasts are important in our present.[3]Everybody promotes her/himself. TV “reality shows” such as Got Talent[4] are the most followed TV broadcasts worldwide because they select unknown people and connect them with an audience. These shows reveal unexpressed skills and creative capacities the same way online social media websites crowd-source knowledge and reconnect with the past. Like TV talent shows, social media allow different publics to promote themselves, their family history, and their communities.Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu defined the systematic repetition of similar family photographs as emblematic of popular behaviour and culture.[5] Sharing different generations’ family pictures in social media shapes collective memories.[6] On the other hand, such popular demand for genealogy[7] only scratches the surface of major events in history and is often disconnected from “big history” and broader contexts. But photography, in social media, describes popular behaviours – “selfies” today – [8] and, thanks to linked data technologies, Google Maps, and Street View, adds spatial dimensions and time boundaries to individual memories.

Pinning your images with Historypin, a digital time machine

“Historypin is a digital time machine that creates a new way for the world to see and share history.”[9] Linked data and the Semantic Web connect digital contents, combining primary sources with geography.[10] Old pictures can be “pinned” in the present: family pasts may be re-enacted today. Heritage institutions, but also common people, organize forms of storytelling because the technology is easy. Public historians takeHistorypin seriously to engage with specific communities.[11] Using Historypin, the American National Archives is now everywhere outside the building in the virtual space[12] and solicits everybody’s contribution to historical archives, inviting the wider public to “pin your history to the world.”[13] In Florence, during a public exhibition (2014) commemorating the 70th anniversary of the end of the German occupation,[14] citizens brought their documents on site, using the MemorySharing project. Old 1944 documents were scanned and included in today’s maps of Florence. New Zealand soldiers are now re-enacted directly on Google Street View.[15] You can fade the vintage picture[16] to see the contemporary layer of the street.Could academic historians use the potential of digital public history, with Historypin, a tool that makes it easy to re-enact even difficult pasts? Alon Confino tried to reconstruct the pre-1948 invisible Palestinian past of Tantura, Dor in today’s Israel. Confino studied cadastral maps, aerial photography, and images of Palestinians recorded prior to May 22–23, 1948. But user-generated content from social media would add original Palestinian diaspora documents: re-enacting 1948 Palestinian memories should be possible.[17]

Visual narrative public history

Inspired by a photograph, Michael Hughes’ Flickr project “Souvenirs”,[18] Looking into the Past merges past and present in a unique image.[19] “Ghosting family pasts”, thanks to digital technologies, is very popular for resuscitating memories. Merging old pictures and recent images shortens the digital timeline and activates different regimes of historicity in the present.[20]Emblematic of many others projects around the world, the Past Present Project in Tumblr[21] publishes family pictures where past and present overlap.[22] Images showing the pastness of places shape a nostalgic present, such as the merged urban temporalities of the Hungarian artist Zoltán Kerényi,[23] or Hebe Robinson’s Northern Norway Echoes, a project placing old family photos from a Lofoten fishing village, abandoned after WW2, in today’s landscape.[24] Sometimes called rephotography,[25] these new images contain different time layers in one unique image. Even WW1 images are “ghosted” in a past-present continuum.[26] The same is done with WW2 images by the Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov in Link to the Past.[27] The author of a website about Krakow “looks for very old photos of the city and takes new ones from the very same spot, so my readers can compare and see what has changed”.[28] Keith Jones, inLiverpool then and now,[29] lets us discover “blended shots”: old black and white images merged with colour images.[30]

Past-present relationships in photographs

The Italian photographer, Isabella Balena, took pictures of the Gothic Line ruins that stopped the allied offensive in 1944 in central Italy sixty years after the event. Ci resta il nome, a photographic journey through the memory of WW2 in Italy is a good example of visual narrative public history.[31] What is important in Balena’s systematic reproduction of monuments and traces of the violent past is to show how the place where Mussolini was shot in April 1945 tells about both presentism and oblivion and is open to the present and new futures.But photography may also show that the present has lost its connection with the past. Total disconnection with history is what Serge Gruzinski demonstrates with the cover picture of his book, L’Histoire pour quoi faire?:[32] young, post-colonial Algerians playing soccer. Their goalkeeper stands in front of an ancient Roman arch, a symbol of lost memories. The arch does not mean anything to them. Instead, in the context of today’s Isis campaigns, the Islamic State extremists destroy past heritages, so that history could be rewritten and memory cancelled forever.[33]